Global community healthcare: taking health technology local
Improving global health requires getting healthcare information to the local level. In this video, Healthmaker Robert Bollinger, MD, director of the Center for Global Health Education, explains how technology is bridging the gap.
Transcript
In making tough decisions about healthcare, it's important to have the right information. And technology is giving us information.
It's giving us more reliable information in real time. So the ability to use technology is to respond to crises quickly
and in more effectively, whether it be a new outbreak in the community, or whether it be a crisis a patient may have in their home with a cardiac problem.
I think what I'm excited about is the ability to intervene more quickly, and more efficiently, and earlier in a process.
It's not completely preventative approach. But we're pushing that definition a little bit as we push the cost of care down as best we can,
push the point of care out to the community. [LIGHT CHEERY MUSIC]
I was telling somebody recently, in my own experience, I use technology all the time to teach students all over the world.
But when I want to teach how to care for a patient at the bedside, I have my no screen rule.
So when we go into a patient's room with the students and the residents, I tell them all the screens get turned off.
It's eyes on the patient, hands on the patient. We don't want to have technology interfere with that trust.
You know, what matters is what's really killing people. And when we think about children in the world less than five
years old, of course, it's diseases of childhood, vaccine preventable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia
that we worry most about. We also worry about the health of their mothers. So maternal health issues and surviving childbirth
is a major challenge still. That's an example, for instance, of a challenge that's tough. You can't really fix that with a vaccine.
To deliver a healthy baby and have a healthy mother requires a trained healthcare provider. Someone told me recently we spend 60% of our health dollars
on the last six months of life. That's a choice. Certainly not a choice a lot of other communities and societies
either can or will be willing to make. They choose to spend the resources more on preventative care, on helping mothers deliver their babies because that's
their major challenge. So I think it's all about the choices we want to make as a society. They're not easy choices.
We're used to having these options. If you have a community that has few healthcare providers, don't have enough doctors and nurses, the ones that are there
have to do more. They have to become experts in everything. So a community health worker in a village in Africa
has to be able to help deliver a baby, deliver vaccines, treat malaria, treat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis,
and then maybe even hypertension over the next 20 years. Finding ways to help those providers be able to multitask,
it's really changed the way we view how we educate people. And even in the United States, I mean, social media and access to the internet
is breaking down the barriers between patients and providers. Our patients are much better informed often because they're part of a community of patients.
So they come into our offices asking a lot more questions and different questions than they would have 20 years ago.
So that's certainly going to happen in Africa. And I think that's potentially a powerful thing. If you empower patients, if you empower the community
with information, they're going to be demanding better services and better health outcomes from their own governments,
from their own community programs, and hospitals, and clinicians. [AUDIO LOGO]
health care
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